It’s now total war against the BRICS

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of "Globalistan" (2007), "Red Zone Blues" (2007), "Obama does Globalistan" (2009) and "Empire of Chaos" (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is "2030", also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015.

July 15, 2014. BRICS leaders -- President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Chinese President Xi Jinping and South African President Jacob Zuma (from left to right) -- pose for a group photo in the Congress Center in Fortaleza. (RIA Novosti) / RIA Novosti

Fasten your seat belts: the information war already unleashed against Russia is bound to expand to Brazil, India and China.

Brazil, Russia, India and China, as it’s widely known, are the
top four members of the BRICS group of emerging powers, which
also includes South Africa and will incorporate other Global
South nations in the near future. The BRICS immensely annoy
Washington – and its Think Tankland – as they embody the
concerted Global South push towards a multipolar world.

Bottles of Crimean champagne could be bet that the US response to
such a process couldn’t be but a sort of total information war -
not dissimilar in spirit to the NSA’s deep state Total
Information Awareness (TIA), a crucial element of the Pentagon’s
Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. The BRICS
are seen as a major threat – so to counteract them implies
domination of the information grid.

Vladimir Davydov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences'
Institute of Latin America, was spot on when he remarked,
“The current situation shows that there are attempts to
suppress not only Russia but also the BRICS given that the global
role of this association has only intensified.”

Russia demonization has quickly escalated in the US from
sanctions related to Ukraine to Putin as the “new Hitler” and the
resurrection of the time-tested Cold War scare “The Russians are
coming”.

In the case of Brazil the information war already started way
before the reelection of President Dilma Rousseff. As much as
Wall Street and its local comprador elites were doing everything
to tank what they define as a “statist” economy, Dilma was also
personally demonized.

Not so far-fetched steps in the near future might include
sanctions on China because of its “aggressive” position
in the South China Sea, or Hong Kong, or Tibet; sanctions on
India because of Kashmir; sanctions on Brazil because of human
rights violations or excess deforestation. Selected Indian
diplomats, off the record, deplore that the first BRICS nation to
buckle under pressure will be India.

As the BRICS are the de facto key bricks in building a more
democratic, inclusive global system of international relations
and financial system – there are no others in the market – at
least they seem to be alert enough. If they are not, each nation
is bound to be knocked out one by one.

Georgy Toloraya, executive director of the Russian National
Committee on BRICS Research, points out that at least there’s
“more and more communication taking place through BRICS
channels today.”

Brazilians, for instance, are particularly interested in
investment cooperation. The BRICS Development Bank will be a
reality in 2015. And a Russian team is preparing a detailed
report on the future prospects of BRICS cooperation bound to be
discussed in-depth in Beijing in over a week, concomitant to the
APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit.

From energy war to currency war

The new Saudi oil shock – which got at a minimum a
green light by the Obama administration – totally fits the
pattern of a TIA-style offensive against the BRICS, with two of
them as key targets: Russia and Brazil.

Over 50% of Russia’s budget comes from revenue from oil and gas.
Every $10 drop in the price of a barrel of oil means Russia
losing up to $14.6 billion a year. This may be offset somewhat by
the weakening of the ruble – more than 25% against the US dollar
since early 2014. And Russia of course still has around $450
billion in reserves. Still, Russia’s economy may grow by just 0.5
to 2% in 2015.

With each $1 drop in crude oil prices, Brazil’s number one
company, Petrobras, loses more than $900 million. At current oil
price levels, Petrobras will be losing around $14 billion a year.
So the price drop does undermine Petrobras’ long-term expansion
to fund new infrastructure and exploration projects linked to its
valuable “pre-salt” oil deposits. Petrobras was a key target
linked to the demonization of Rousseff.

Iran is not part of the BRICS but shares the group’s push towards
a multipolar world. Iran needs oil at $136 a barrel to balance
its budget. A nuclear deal with the P5+1 to be struck in three
weeks, on November 24, could lead to the easing of sanctions – at
least from Europe – and allow Iran to boost oil exports. Yet in
Tehran there are no illusions about how the manipulation of oil
prices has been engineered to further destabilize Iran’s economy
and undermine its position in the nuclear negotiations.

On the economic front, TIA manifests itself via the Fed ending of
QE (quantitative easing): this means the US dollar will keep
going up, and more US dollars will be departing emerging markets.
Xinhua has seriously tackled the issue.

The US dollar and the yuan are effectively linked. When the US
dollar goes up, the yuan also goes up. Yet it’s the Chinese
economy that suffers. What Beijing is worried is how Chinese
manufacturing may become too expensive in arrays of markets where
profit margins are already very slim.

So what will certainly happen is China’s Central Bank setting up
a controlled fall of the yuan – and at the same time developing
mechanisms to fight the outflow of hot money, especially to Hong
Kong.

China may be relatively immune to the end of QE. Yet everyone in
Asia remembers very well the 1997 financial crisis, which spilled
over to Russia in 1998. The only benefactor then was – what else
– corporate US interests and Washington hegemony.

The center cannot hold

BRICS demonization, in different gradations, will continue
unabated – with the central focus on Russia, which, by the way,
will launch World War III. Why? Because the Americans said so.

The latest exhibit concerns the Danish Defense Intelligence
Service (DDIS), who revealed last week that Russia simulated an
attack with fighter jets and missiles on the island of Bornholm
in June.

DDIS did not disclose any concrete details about the simulated
attack. But emphasized it was the largest Russian military
exercise over the Baltic Sea since 1991. DDIS issued a Risk Assessment 2014, predicting that “over
the next few years, the situation in eastern Ukraine will highly
likely turn into a new frozen European conflict.”

The Danes, though, were very clear: “There are no indications
that Russia constitutes an increased direct military threat to
Danish territory.” None of this prevented the usual US military
officials to spin Russia is preparing to launch World War III.

There’s absolutely no evidence Washington is prepared to even
discuss the possibility of modifying the current world-system, as
Immanuel Wallerstein theorized, towards a more democratized
management. The upcoming G20 in Australia once again will make
this very clear.

So what’s happening is the system, increasingly fragmented,
slouching inexorably towards a catastrophic breaking point. TIA
and its sidekicks and circumvolutions are just a desperate
“strategy” to postpone the inevitable decadence. Wallerstein in
the end was right; the post-Cold War world is bound to remain
immensely volatile.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.